


Pretty Things All the Time

by Mosca



Category: Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, New York City
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:22:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21816598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: Amita's back in New York, and Daphne is in the mood for a little heist.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 108
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Pretty Things All the Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DaisyNinjaGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyNinjaGirl/gifts).



> Thanks to my beta, Lovessong, for the title and for telling me this story needed more Constance.
> 
> This story contains canon-consistent disregard for the law and strong femslash vibes.

Daphne texts Amita so fast after Amita’s plane lands at JFK, it looks like witchcraft. Amita is sure the explanation is as prosaic as the flight tracker on the airline website, but she’s still startled to see **You’re back! Let’s get dinner!** the moment she takes her phone out of airplane mode. Amita’s body wants a king-size hotel bed, room service, and a Real Housewives marathon, but her heart wants friendship. She’s made acquaintances and professional connections from Barcelona to Kolkata, but New York is still the only place in the world where someone will text her just because she likes her. 

Amita has fifteen luxurious minutes to drop her bags in her room and smear on a fresh coat of lipstick. She’s making angels on the bed when Daphne texts to say their ride is parked in front of the hotel. Amita shrugs her coat back on and grabs her room key, waving goodbye to her soft, soft mattress.

The ride is a giant black SUV, operated by a more discreet, more expensive Uber variant. Daphne talks through the whole ride while the driver pretends not to listen or to know who Daphne is. “Do you ever think about pulling another heist?” Daphne asks, the lights of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway glowing yellow halos around her face. 

“It’s not like I need the money,” Amita says.

“No, just for fun,” Daphne says. “To see if you could pull it off. For the rush.”

“For the rush,” Amita repeats. “Nope. Not ever.”

Daphne’s body sinks into a pout. Amita can’t tell how much of it is theater.

They arrive at the restaurant and are whisked through a back entrance. Even though it’s Wednesday and snowing, a crowd of patrons clogs the doorway and spills onto the sidewalk. “I always feel a little bad for cutting in line,” Daphne says. “But not bad enough not to do it.” 

The pretentious blurb at the top of the menu describes Contemporary Indian Street Food, which Amita would take exception to if it didn’t sound amazing. “The phuchka are the _thing_ here,” Daphne says, except that she pronounces it “fooch-ka,” and Amita has to correct her. Daphne asks, “Is that weird for you? Did you just grow up with this stuff?”

“Kind of,” Amita says. “Nobody in Jackson Heights is filling them with duck confit.”

They order a bunch of different kinds and share. “I like that you’re a food sharer,” Amita says. “I went out with a guy in Prague who was the opposite. A food _hoarder._ I should have known he’d be the same way in bed.”

“So, still nobody special?” Daphne says nonjudgmentally.

Amita shrugs. “I haven’t been staying in one place long enough, I guess.” The more complicated truth, the one she doesn’t want to get into, is that there’s a war between the part of her that believes her European prince will magically appear in a Tinder swipe, and the part that believes she’s happier alone after all. Her heart has no middle ground. She changes the subject. “The phuchka are really good. Thanks.”

“So good,” Daphne says through a full mouth. “The potato ones are the best. Maybe because they’re carbs stuffed with carbs. I could just - you know what? I _could_ just.” She raises a slim, manicured hand to get the server’s attention. “Is there any way I could have a recipe for this? Personal use only, of course.”

The server purses her lips. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that will be possible. Even for a VIP. The chef is in the middle of a trademark dispute, so everything’s pretty locked down in the kitchen.”

Amita would have assumed Daphne would push it further, but Daphne drops it. “There are other ways to get your hands on things, after all,” Daphne whispers when the server has gone.

Amita shakes her head fervently. “I told you, I’m out.”

“Come on. It’ll be fun,” Daphne says.

Amita folds her arms and glares. Daphne mirrors her, a parody of Amita’s body language that makes her look like a petulant toddler.

“At least let’s not discuss it here?” Amita says.

Daphne pays the check. Amita peeks at the receipt and sees that Daphne has left a 100% tip. Amita tries to imagine the past life in which Daphne was waiting tables, waiting to be seen, to become a star.

As soon as they get in the car, Amita is ready to talk Daphne out of intellectual property theft, but Daphne says, “Shh, not until we get there.”

“Where’s ‘there’?” Amita asks, but Daphne just shushes her again.

The car drops them off at a bar in Fort Greene. It’s in the sweet spot between dead and crammed; the clientele consists mostly of black hipster pool sharks, but Amita doesn’t feel unwelcome. Apparently, Daphne is a regular, because the bartender presents them with drinks before Amita has taken her coat off. Amita sniffs her glass, afraid to ask what’s in it.

“Rum, CBD, and sunshine,” Daphne says, raising her glass.

“So. This recipe that you’re not going to steal, because we all have better things to do,” Amita says.

“We’d have to get someone hired there,” Daphne says. “In the kitchen. I can’t think of any way to play it except as a slow con, and that’s what makes it exciting.”

Daphne is bubbling with possibilities, and Amita doesn’t want to deflate her. She plays along. “How would you get a camera in? Unless you’re planning to have the plant memorize it.”

“I don’t know. I’m not there yet,” Daphne says.

“Get a camera in where?” A woman says behind them, flat and dismissive, as if she’s doing them a favor by barging into their conversation. 

Amita panics for a moment before she places the voice. “Nine Ball! I should have known this was your bar.” She sips the drink, now that she finally has a chance to taste it. She would have said, "This is amazing," even if it were horrible, but she's glad to mean it.

Daphne gets up to give Nine Ball a big, bouncy hug. Amita and Nine Ball do a brief dance with their arms halfway outstretched before Nine Ball offers a fist bump and a laugh. 

Nine Ball pulls up a bar stool. “So what are we stealing?”

“A recipe,” Daphne says, at the same time that Amita says, “Absolutely nothing.”

Nine Ball whips out her phone. After a few rounds of texting, during which neither Daphne nor Amita is brave enough to ask what she’s doing, Nine Ball announces, “Constance will be here in ten minutes. She has restaurant experience.”

When Constance arrives, she runs toward Daphne, and the two of them grab hands and jump up and down. She’s more restrained with Amita, almost polite. “You got that thing in the back for me?” Constance asks Nine Ball, and they disappear behind an Employees Only sign to retrieve something Amita definitely does not want to ask about.

“Did you stay friends with _everybody_?” Amita asks Daphne.

“Pretty much,” Daphne says. “I thought Lou had ghosted me for a while, but after _How to Be Both_ came out, she sent me a five-page letter of scene-by-scene feedback. Handwritten, in the mail. No return address.”

“So she loved it,” Amita says. Of course she did. Film critics universally agreed that Daphne’s directorial debut was the most egregious Oscar snub of the year.

“You haven’t kept in touch with anybody?” Daphne asks, as if this is strange.

“You’re the only one who really reaches out,” Amita says. “I knew Debbie from before, but I’m not sure I’d exactly call her a friend.”

Before Daphne can drown Amita in misplaced pity, Nine Ball and Constance return, replete with plans for how to craft Constance’s resume and where to stash a camera. Amita pretends to disappear into her drink and hopes they won’t find a way to shoehorn her into the scheme.

“...And if it’s not in English, that’s fine, Amita speaks Hindi, right?”

Drat. Shoehorned.

The excruciating, wonderful thing about well-planned crime is that it is slow. Constance will spend a few weeks working at the restaurant before she sends any information: partially to gain the staff’s trust, and partially because they won’t trust _her_ with anything but basic prep during her trial period. 

Amita has promised to stay in New York until this leisurely heist is complete. She spends time with her family, whom she’d actually begun to miss. She goes on a few lonely, dead-end dates. She strolls Gantry Plaza in the mushy melting snow and admires the patterns of color and shape that the sun forms on the river below and the skyline above. They make her think of gemstones. She goes back to her hotel room and sketches. She’s been designing since she was a child, in her mind and in the margins of her schoolwork. This is the first time when she’s had not only the freedom and the means but the desire to shape metal and stone just as she’s imagined it.

She’s all but forgotten about the heist when she gets a text from Daphne, asking her to come down to Nine Ball’s bar and look at the photos that Constance has taken. **You can’t just send me the pictures?** Amita writes back.

 **Nine Ball doesn’t trust your phone encryption,** Daphne says, so it’s back to Brooklyn as if the internet was never invented.

There is, of course, a problem. “This is Bengali,” Amita explains. “I can’t read Bengali. I can speak it a little, but it’s a whole different alphabet.”

“How fast can you learn?” Nine Ball asks, like she can’t conceive of it being a big deal.

“Not overnight,” Amita says.

“Well, it’ll give you something to do while you’re holed up in that hotel room,” Daphne says, then bites her lip. It’s good that she realizes how unkind she sounds, even if it’s too late.

“I’m not holed up,” Amita says. “I’m -” But she stops short of telling them about her notebook full of sketches or the metals and gems she’s been sourcing. 

“Come on,” Daphne says. “Let’s get a bagel.”

Daphne’s definition of getting a bagel is sending her assistant to pick up the food while they sit in the kitchen of Daphne’s palatial townhouse in Park Slope. When the assistant returns, Daphne scoops her bagel out of the paper bag like it’s a precious woodland creature, then squeezes it so the cream cheese oozes out of the sides. “Going behind the camera was the best decision I ever made.” She goes on for a bit about projects she’s considering: a character role in a Netflix series, a cross-cast production of _Julius Caesar,_ a quirky little urban sci-fi movie she can’t decide whether to produce or direct. “And now is when you tell me what you’re working on,” Daphne concludes.

“Working on?”

“You’re not acting like someone who’s holed up,” Daphne says. “You’re acting like someone with a secret project. Which I promise to wear _everywhere._ ”

“It’s just sketches now,” Amita says.

“So I guess you’ll go back to Europe to actually make the pieces.” Daphne looks lonesome at the thought.

“I don’t know,” Amita says. “Maybe. A person should be able to live anywhere, right? So I thought, Milan, I’m in love with Milan. And Prague, and Lausanne, Paris, Gothenburg. I have the money to get an apartment in all those places and just bounce from one to another. But I’m in Queens for a week, and I’m home. Or more like, I’m homesick for the place I am.”

Daphne jumps up from the kitchen table, bagel in hand. “So you’re staying! You’re staying.”

“I think so,” Amita says. “Ask me again tomorrow.”

“Take your time with the Bengali,” Daphne says. “I’d rather have an Amita original to wear around my neck.”

When Amita gets an encrypted text from Constance the next day at four in the morning, she assumes it's another cockeyed photo of grease-stained kitchen notes that might be illegible even if she could read Bangla script. Instead, she gets, **That's it! I quit!!! No more restaurant jobs ever!!!**

Queens has gone dormant, but Manhattan glows through Amita's hotel window from across the river. **Congrats?!**

A moment later, Constance is Facetiming her. Amita kicks off the covers and sits up in bed, pulling her hair into a bun, more charmed than irritated at Constance's indifference to the concept of time.

"So there's this douche on the prep line," Constance begins, like the story is a puppy squirming in her arms that she has to set free. "Acts like he's executive chef, when his real job is to chop onions and take out the trash. Thinks I should smile more, tells the dishwashers to go back to Mexico even though they're all from Venezuela, that guy. I've been lifting his stuff since day two on the job, because you know, victimless crime. I take his cigarettes, MetroCard every time he gets a new one, pull one key off his keychain and put it back the next day. Baby stuff. He makes an official complaint after like a week, says it must be one of the dishwashers because he's _that guy._ There's a halfhearted investigation but nobody really gives a shit, and in the meantime I obviously stop lifting anything off him. Then, the second it looks like it's going to blow over, I'm like, fuck it, it's funny now, so I gather up all his shit and put it in a wine glass in the ladies' room right before opening. It just sits there until halfway through service, and then one of the servers comes into the kitchen with the wine glass on a tray, pulls out two cigarettes and one of the MetroCards like 'Thanks for the tip,' and leaves him with the rest. He goes apeshit and quits mid-shift, and I'm thinking, my work here is done, right? Management gathers us up after closing like, 'That was clever as hell but we still need to do something about it,' and I'm wondering what I'm still there for, so I say I'll take the blame if everyone else's job is safe."

"That was nice of you? I think?" Amita says, laughing. "So what are you going to do now?"

Constance shrugs. "We don't really _have_ to do anything, do we?"

"I'm glad it's not just me who's bad at doing nothing," Amita says.

Later the same day, Amita signs a lease for a penthouse apartment in Astoria. Her mother throws a housewarming party before she can bring furniture in, and all of Amita’s relatives marvel at the view. And at Amita’s movie star friend, who stands in the kitchen, eating the homemade phuchka that Amita’s aunt brought. “Why didn’t you tell me about these? You could have saved us all a heist,” Daphne says.

“I still can’t read Bengali,” Amita says. “But my aunt can. She grew up in Kolkata.”

Daphne raises her half-eaten snack like it’s a shot glass. “Cheers.”

Amita grabs a whole one from the plate and lifts it toward the ceiling. “To victimless crimes.”


End file.
